There are generally 4 full conferences in Naismith DIII. 3 of them have, for the most part, decided to take part in an non-conference challenge.

I have two possible templates for how the challenge would be set up. Both would be pretty simple to do - everyone would just need to schedule games.

In both templates, teams are assigned a seed based on their relative RPI in the conference (we do this in Iba DII with CVAC/Heartland Challenge, it works very well - and ranking teams by any other method seems to fall apart)

One template has every team participating in "one" challenge game every non-conf. The other template has every team participating in "two" games.

Template 1(remember what I said above - teams are ranked by their relative RPI within the conference)
(lets say we do this weeks #5 through #10 - to give teams a chance to begin to improve in non-conf and get settled)

There are a total of 18 Games (3 per day) with every team playing 1 game. I understand CCIW has a ghost ship, we can work around that, or just not play that particular game. I like this template because every team only has to play one game. The position of the 3 conferences in the template will rotate every season.

If it seems a little confusing, I generally set the schedules and site-mail everyone, so it shouldn't be a problem. If someone needs to set a game for a different week, that's not usually an issue either.

I vote #2. Part of the coolness of the tri-conference challenge is playing both conferences every year. Plus I like the idea of setting weeks 7-9 aside for the challenge every year. I feel like system #1 would lead to more scheduling mishaps (accidentally setting another game during my challenge week).

the main problem with 2 is that each team would have to play 2 games. I'm not completely convinced that everyone would be in on that....it might be much harder to schedule. I see your point mrg. I'll wait a few days to get more opinions.

Posted by paland on 8/9/2012 2:17:00 AM (view original):Keep in mind that several of us have long term rivalries already scheduled on those late weeks. So as long as we can be flexible, I will go for either one.

Posted by halfakracka on 8/11/2012 7:48:00 PM (view original):Cciw votes template 2..... i would like to throw in the idea instead of using rpi, our conference decides our own ranks 1 through 12

In my experience, the conference deciding their own rankings makes things a lot more complicated. Conference-mates tend to argue these things and decisions don't always get made in time. RPI isn't perfect, but it usually lines up the better teams against one another.

Thanks for the vote......Looks like more votes are leaning toward #2, ....if it stays that way, I'll set it up that way.

I actually like #2 better as well. I think we should all play 1 game against each conference, so 2 games. We will probably have to be flexible with when the games are scheduled, but I think we need to try to schedule them in the same weeks as much as possible.

As someone who plays in the CVAC-Heartland Challenge in D2 Iba, also set up by bbunch, I think this is a great idea. That Challenge has fostered a good rivalry between our conferences. Ranking the teams by RPI is definitely the best way to decide who plays who. The only flaw with that system is that you are scheduling a game for 2 seasons after the RPIs used to set the schedule were generated, so there can be changes in which the strongest teams in each conference are, but that would be the case no matter what scheduling methodolgy we use.

OK - this should be the schedule. I will send out site-mails once new scheduling can occur.

Note: If the week that your team is supposed to play is UNAVAILABLE due to a matchup that you always have on that day, let me know that you want to schedule the game on a different week, and it will be cool.

Also: there might be some sims if anyone leaves one of these fine conferences. If there's ever a possible sim vs. sim matchup, we will just not count the game. In addition, if there's any issue with an unschedulable ghost shipped team, those games will just not be counted as well (CCIW might have an issue w/ this next season w/ their 12 seed)

For a catchy name, how about the Big Freedom and Little Two? Just re-reading it brings tears to my eyes.

Other possibilitites is 'The Beasts of Basketball' ......'Basketball Bravado'.....or my favorite '****-A-Hoop Classic'. ****-a-Hoop is an old word, first used in 1663, that means 'triumphantly boasting'